The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust & Skyler White

Publisher:

Tor

Copyright:

September 2013

ISBN:

0-7653-3422-4

Format:

Hardcover

Pages:

304

The Incrementalists are a secret society that has been in continuous
existence for forty thousand years. The members are immortal... sort of
(more on that in a moment). They are extremely good at determining what
signals, triggers, and actions have the most impact on people, and adept
at using those triggers to influence people's behavior. And they're
making the world better. Not in any huge, noticeable way, just a little
bit, here and there. Incrementally.

Brust and White completely had me with this concept. There are several SF
novels about immortals, but (apart from the vampire subgenre) they mostly
stay underground and find ways to survive without trying to change the
surrounding human society. I love the idea of small, incremental changes,
and I was looking forward to reading a book about how that would work.
How do they choose what to do? How do they find the right place to push?
What long-term goals would such an organization pursue, and what
governance structure would they use?

I'm still wondering about most of those things, sadly, since that isn't
what this novel is about at all.

I should be fair: a few of those questions hover in the background. There
are some political arguments (that parallel arguments on Brust's blog),
and a tiny bit about governance. But mostly this is a sort of romance, a
fight over identity, and an extensive exploration of the mental "garden"
that the Incrementalists use and build to hold their memories and share
information with each other.

The story revolves around two Incrementalists: Phil, who is one of the
leaders and has one of the longest continuous identities of any of the
group, and Renee, a new recruit by Phil who picks up the memories and
capabilities (sort of) of the recently-deceased Incrementalist Celeste.
Phil is the long-term insider, although a fairly laid-back one. Renee is
the outsider, the one to which the story is happening at the beginning,
who is taught how the Incrementalists' system works. The
Incrementalists is told in alternating first-person viewpoint sections by
Phil and Renee (making me wonder if the characters were each written by
one of the authors).

Once I got past my disappointment over this book not being quite what I
wanted, the identity puzzles that Brust and White play with here caught my
attention. The underlying "magic" of the Incrementalists is based on the
"memory palace" concept of storing memories via visualizations, but takes
it into something akin to personal alternate worlds. Their immortality
isn't through physical immortality, but rather the ability to store their
memories and personality in their garden, which is their term for the
memory palace, and then have it imposed on someone else: a combination of
reincarnation, mental takeover, and mental merging. This makes for
complex interpersonal relationships and complex interactions between
memory, belief, and identity, not to mention some major ethical issues,
which come to a head in Phil and Renee's relationship and Celeste's
lingering meddling.

I think Brust and White are digging into some interesting questions of
character here. There's a lot of emphasis in The Incrementalists
on the ease with which people can be manipulated, and the Incrementalists
themselves are far from immune. Choice and personal definition are both
questionable concepts given how much influence other people have, how many
vulnerabilities everyone carries with them, and how much one's opinions
are governed by one's life history. That makes identity complex, and
raises the question of whether one can truly define oneself.

But, while all these ideas are raised, I think The Incrementalists
dances around them more than engages them directly. It's similar to the
background hook: yes, these people are slowly improving the world, and we
see a little bit of that (and a little bit of them manipulating people for
their own convenience), but the story doesn't fully engage with the idea.
There's a romance, a few arguments, some tension, some world-building, but
I don't feel like this book ever fully committed to any of them. One of
the occasional failure modes of Brust for me is insufficient explanation
and insufficient clarity, and I hit that here.

My final impression of The Incrementalists is interesting,
enjoyable, but vaguely disappointing. It's still a good story with some
interesting characters and nice use of the memory palace concept, and I
liked Renee throughout (although I think the development of the love story
is disturbingly easy and a little weird). But I can't strongly recommend
it, and I'm not sure if it's worth seeking out.